Harry did his initial grade guitar exam this morning. While we were waiting with the other kids and parents, we found out his guitar teacher had once supported John Otway. I thought that was pretty cool. I used to play John Otway and Wild Willy Barrett's Head Butts now and again on my student radio show. My recollection is that I first picked that single out of URH's rather meagre library because it was released on Safari Records. One of the first records I'd ever bought was on Safari and the distinctive label design stuck in my head.

One of my Dad's favourite things to do was to occasionally point at the TV and declare, triumphantly, "I was at university with him!" I have no recollection of who these luminaries were and, it later turned out, he didn't actually know any of them. What he actually meant was "I was at the same university as him and our time there overlapped to a greater or lesser degree". There are people I could do that with now, apart from the television part. Television isn't the same as it was thirty years ago.

My stupidly packed calendar (and please believe me that absolutely isn't bragging) tells me that we don't have anything booked in for Saturday May 4, so I'm going to try to head down to Oxford for The Phoenix Children's Comics Festival. Harry and I are big fans of The Phoenix, particularly my long-time-comics-chum-on-the-internet Neill Cameron's The Pirates of Pangaea. I hope one day to be able to point you to a lovely book gathering them into one wonderfully piratically dinosaury volume.